Wayland Town Crier 5/7/12: Saving the American chestnut tree . If poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “The Village Blacksmith” today, it would likely begin, “Under the scraggly, diseased and dying chestnut tree … .” For more than a century, a relentless blight has decimated the American chestnut tree, driving the nation’s once grandest hardwood to the edge of extinction.